I am sincerely asking for your thoughts here...
My sense of it is that SAG leadership is telling their friends - "leadership" = individuals who gossip just like everyone else - that they don't want to go on strike and it is unlikely they will go on strike. The AFTRA deal makes it even harder, though SAG membership that doesn't worry about the threat of AFTRA lowering the bar endlessly should get medical attention. And the leadership and the membership all can see that the industry is having a major regression and that any work they lose may well never be made up.
I didn't think that the WGA Strike would affect the industry too much. But it has been more damaging than it seemed, by achieving its goals... the strike pushed forward the then-still-percolating reality of a media landscape that becomes less and less limited by tradition delivery schedules and means each month. The cost to the studios will be more subtle than I expected, as the most successful shows will pay the price more than the failures... or how do you get people excited about Grey's Anatomy when they left off with the show in a sophomore slump?
In any case, with opportunities dropping away in an already problematic market for actors, going on strike seems nothing but self-destructive. If I were strategizing with SAG, I’d try to get as short an extension as possible and to then, to start working on internal issues, seriously considering what the union needs to be doing for actors as a union… and then prepare for a more serious strike. There is a lot of work to do about rethinking how a working actor can survive a life as an actor. And they can’t get what they really need from amptp or anyone else until they have some unity of what that means.
Anyway… as someone said the other night, they keep informed about every damned thing and they couldn’t come up with a single significant point of discussion regarding the threat of a SAG Strike. Even Strike Queen Nikki can barely get it up to overstimulate the rabid throngs…. which means the rabid throngs aren’t sending her e-mails, or we’d be reading them… which means that the throng is focused on other things… like survival.
Your thoughts please…
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/06/just_wondering_1.html